“I’ll bet you, monsieur,” said my guide, as we reached the foot of the mountain, “I’ll bet you a cigar that I can guess what you are going to do at Monsieur de Peyrehorade’s.”
“Why, that is not very hard to guess,” I replied, offering him a cigar. “At this time of day, when one has walked six leagues over Canigou, the most urgent business is supper.”
“Yes, but to-morrow? Look you, I’ll bet that you have come to Ille to see the idol! I guessed that when I saw you drawing pictures of the saints at Serrabona.”
“The idol! what idol?” The word had aroused my curiosity.
“What! didn’t any one at Perpignan tell you how Monsieur de Peyrehorade had found an idol in the ground?”
“You mean a terra-cotta, or clay statue, don’t you?”
“No, indeed! I mean a copper one, and it’s big enough to make a lot of big sous. It weighs as much as a church bell. It was way down in the ground, at the foot of an olive tree, that we found it.”
“So you were present at the discovery, were you?”
“Yes, monsieur. Monsieur de Peyrehorade told us a fortnight ago, Jean Coll and me, to dig up an old olive tree that got frozen last year—for it was a very hard winter, you know. So, while we were at work, Jean Coll, who was going at it with all his might, dug his pick into the dirt, and I heard a bimm—just as if he’d struck a bell.—‘What’s that?’ says I. We kept on digging and digging, and first a black hand showed; it looked like a dead man’s hand sticking out of the ground. For my part, I was scared. I goes to monsieur, and I says to him: ‘Dead men under the olive tree, master. You’d better call the curé.’
“‘What dead men?’ he says.